Page 4 of Wes and Addie Had Their Chance

The rabbit ears on the ancient relic of a television sitting on the counter of the Valet Forge Car Service office only picked

up six or seven channels. On a cloudy day like this one, I was lucky to get four. My shift at Valet Forge had been going since

noon with nary a customer. Now, as the sun began to set, was it too much to ask that one of those TV channels air a hockey

game or an episode of The Simpsons , or really anything other than shots of my ex-fiancé shaking hands and kissing babies?

I’d meant what I’d said. Every single word. His name had no power over me, and neither did his face. But my brain hadn’t yet

gotten the hang of not comparing and contrasting the boy I’d known with the most beloved man of Every. Single. News cycle.

I was an analyst. I had been an analyst, anyway.

A good one. I might have left the agency a year ago, but that didn’t mean my brain just suddenly stopped analyzing.

So yeah. Each time I saw Senator Wesley Garrett Hobbes of the great state of Connecticut, my brain automatically tried to make sense of it.

My job had been all about getting from point A to point B.

I hadn’t been a spy or anything exciting like that, though I knew a lot of spies (and truly, being a spy wasn’t usually as exciting as movies and TV shows made most people believe it was).

But I had no doubt most people would view even the real-world version of being a spy as much more exciting than being a CIA analytic methodologist such as yours truly.

Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys were way too sexy to ever be cast as analytic methodologists.

So yeah. I was a highly trained expert at collecting data and figuring out what it all meant. What did it mean, for instance,

that the young man who had very nearly talked me into wearing cargo pants and Converse, Avril Lavigne–style, to our wedding

(with maybe a Britney newsboy cap up top, to make it dressy) was now a style and fashion icon who seemed to be included on

every Best Dressed list in existence? We’d seriously come this close to an early aughts grunge wedding (in the end, almost as close as we came to actually getting married) just so he could get away with wearing jeans, a Hollister shirt, and his

frayed canvas flip-flops. Therefore, my brain found it odd to see him in tailored suits on TV all the time. He gave speeches

in suits. He walked and waved in suits. When a not-at-all-prearranged (um... okay ) opportunity arose to kick a soccer ball around with the UConn collegiate team, he did it without even breaking a sweat.

In a suit.

That’s like point A to point W for my brain, and it can’t help but feel compelled to connect the dots. So forgive me for wishing

anything else was on TV. These days I found connecting dots to be exhausting.

Wes Hobbes. A lock for the nomination. Well on his way to being elected president of the United States before he turned forty-two

years old. The same Wes Hobbes who struggled with reading and spent years trying to claw his way to the back of the pack to

prove he was a follower rather than a leader and who had once claimed, “Everything I know about geography I learned from Carmen Sandiego .” My brain would never be able to make sense of that one.

Of course that was the problem, right? There was no journey that made any sense at all in which that Wes Hobbes— my Wes Hobbes—should have become this Wes Hobbes.

No one ever broached the subject of Wes with me, but at least Laila, Cole, and Brynn didn’t awkwardly avoid it like everyone

else. The four of us hadn’t spent a whole lot of time together since I’d been back, but once in a while, when there was a

mention on the news of the long-missing fifth member of our graduating class, or when a campaign ad came on, one of them would

say something to the effect of, “It’s just so weird to imagine our Wes ever wanting to be president.” They were right. It was. And I would nod along with everyone else, and then we’d change the subject.

But the truth was, I had long ago figured out something very important that hadn’t yet clicked for them. It wasn’t that our Wes had somehow become that Wes. It was that that Wes had always been that Wes. And we hadn’t known him at all. There was no other explanation that made sense.

The guy we thought we’d known probably wouldn’t have wanted to be president, but at the same time, that was just a job. A

path. No one, myself included, would have believed in our childhood that I would go on to become an air force pilot and a

CIA analyst. Trauma changes you. And maybe whatever happened in Wes’s life after he left Adelaide Springs on August 9, 2003,

changed him. Made him shoot higher. Turned him into someone who would excel at leading the entire free world. Maybe he could

even be trusted not to accidentally start a ground war in Newfoundland without consulting dispatches from the chief at ACME

Detective Agency while chasing down a criminal mastermind while wearing a red hat and trench coat. I couldn’t claim to know

anything about any of that. But I knew one thing for sure: our Wes— my Wes—never would have left us. Never would have left me . So he must have actually been that Wes all along.

***

The gentle ding of the door opening pulled my eyes away from the television for the first time in ten minutes or so, and I reflexively hit the power button, causing the image of Adelaide Springs’ lost son to fade from the screen.

“Hey, Boss.” I smiled at Neil Pinkton as his cheeks turned pink at the greeting.

He sighed and shook his head. “Addie, I told you, I’m not your boss.”

I hopped off the stool and leaned across the counter to good-naturedly goad him further—one of my favorite pastimes in recent

days. “Let’s see... you make the schedule, you sign my checks, you know where we keep the good coffee. If that doesn’t

make you the boss, I don’t know what does.” Neil rolled his eyes, and the pink went all the way up to his ears, giving me

the opportunity to add, “And you roll your eyes at me. My last boss rolled his eyes at me constantly, so there’s proof.”

“I’m guessing your last boss wasn’t a twenty-two-year-old with no idea what he was doing.”

My last boss had been a major general who threatened to court-martial us if we didn’t turn off the lights over the sink in

the break room, but I didn’t figure mentioning that would do any favors for Neil’s imposter syndrome.

“No. He wasn’t. But neither are you. Twenty-two, yes. But you’re doing a great job around here. Andrea knew what she was doing,

leaving Valet Forge in your hands.”

“Thanks, Addie.” He paused for just a second and grinned at me before shutting the door behind him. “I don’t know what I’d

do if you weren’t here, that’s for sure.”

Adelaide Springs didn’t have Ubers or Lyfts or buses or taxis. We just had Valet Forge—another essential small-town business

abandoned by Andrea Franklin. Laila had stepped in at the Bean without so much as a note of instruction, but Neil had actually

gotten a phone call. From what I understood, he and Brynn’s husband, Sebastian Sudworth, had been the only ones who had. Neither

one of them had shared many details of what was discussed, but just like that, Neil’s desire to finish business school online

and then find a good job had been put on the fast track.

Well, no, that wasn’t true. School was going to take longer to get through now, since I was his only other driver most of the time.

Sebastian, who had returned to his successful journalism career full-time, rarely had time to tinker with vehicles or serve on city council or tend bar and sing karaoke, as town chatter informed me he had in the years before I arrived back home (in what I could only imagine must have been his midlife crisis years).

Now he and Brynn were in New York more than they were in Colorado.

And Fenton Norris had lost his license months ago after, in his words of defense, mistaking a fallen boulder for a garbage can (and still plowing into it for some inexplicable reason), leaving only young Neil and myself to transport the tourists and elderly can’t-drive-after-dark locals.

“Happy to do it, Boss.”

I liked working with Neil. He had no memories of me. As far as Neil was concerned, I was just Doc’s daughter who had come

back to town, and who happened to be a former CIA analyst, which he thought was pretty cool. He was one of the few in whom

I didn’t discourage the CIA-equals-spy delusions. It made the boring afternoons when he was tired of studying and no one needed a ride much more interesting.

“What’s on the docket for tonight?” I asked. “Do you have a lot of homework?”

He shook his head, fulfilling the dual purpose of answering my question and shaking the snow out of his shaggy strawberry-blond

hair. “No, I don’t have any, if you can believe it. But I do have a hot date with QuickBooks.”

I used my hands to push myself back up onto the stool. “Oh. Well, that’s boring.”

He shrugged. “I like it.” He placed his laptop on the counter in front of us and typed in his password.

Neil, by living in Adelaide Springs since birth, had now been a full-time part of the town longer than I had, but I was only a couple of years behind him if we combined my original residency with my current one.

I certainly knew what it was like to grow up in a town where the residents’ median age seemed to skew a decade older every time you bothered to check.

Young couples tended to leave for better opportunities, taking what could have been the town’s next generation with them.

The kids who made it all the way through school here—like Neil and like me—tended to choose one of two well-worn paths after high school graduation.

Either they got out the first chance they had, or they settled in and became members of the ever-dwindling population.

Of course things didn’t play out exactly like that for Neil or for me. And truth be told, a weird thing had begun happening

in Adelaide Springs over the past few years. New life had been breathed into its rigid, geriatric ways. Having two international

celebrities call the tiny mountain town home—even if those two celebrities ( Do we call journalists celebrities? ), Brynn and Sebastian, only lived here part-time now—had brought a lot of new attention. Combine that with the return of

Township Days—a quirky little festival with absurd origins that dated back to the seventies—and Adelaide Springs was actually

growing for the first time in a century.

“There aren’t a lot of people your age around here, are there?” I asked the direct question with the obvious answer, causing

Neil’s grin to fade quickly.

“No.” He sighed and turned back to the counter. “In fact, there are exactly none.”

I studied him as he slipped the week’s fuel receipts from the spindle on which they were stored and straightened them into

a neat pile before locking them together with a staple.

“What’s the plan, kiddo?”

The final syllable caught in my throat as I said the word.

Kiddo. I’d heard my dad call members of my generation kiddo my entire life.

I’d heard him refer to Laila—forty-year-old Laila—as kiddo that very morning.

Was this how it happened? One day you were the kiddo, and the next you were the matriarchs and patriarchs of an entire community, trading in your snowmobile weekends and ability to rap all the words of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” for achy knees and crossword puzzles and never-ending debates over the virtues of Barbara Mandrell versus Crystal Gayle?

“What do you mean?” Neil kept his eyes on his receipts, but his fingers seemed to forget they were supposed to be inputting

numbers.

I took a deep breath and stepped down from the stool again to stand beside him. “If you hadn’t been handed Valet Forge on

a silver platter, what would you be doing? What was the plan for the next few years?”

He spent the next couple of minutes talking about business plans and getting his MBA and sustainability and initiatives and

statistics, and I think there was a mention in there of geospatial data, and all I could think about was how I’d never seen

someone’s face light up so much when they were talking about such boring stuff.

“But I was always going to come back to Adelaide Springs anyway,” he concluded with a shrug.

My eyebrows rose. “You were?”

“Sure.” He took in a deep breath and released it in the form of a gentle raspberry at his lips. “I think Adelaide Springs

is the most wonderful place in the world, and I want to do what Sebastian and Brynn and Cole and Laila and everybody are doing

now. Making sure it survives and thrives and doesn’t get turned into something it’s not. You know?” He cleared his throat

and chuckled. “That sounds so stupid.”

“No. It doesn’t.” I smiled at him and swallowed down all the advice I wanted to give. Advice about seeing what the rest of

the world had to offer before locking in those thoughts about Adelaide Springs being the most wonderful place. Advice about

how difficult it is to forge your own identity in a community that believes it knows you better than you know yourself. Maybe

even a little advice about how, much like Valet Forge’s long-overdue conversion to QuickBooks, his life in Adelaide Springs

might always feel like it was running several decades behind. “Those are some noble and important dreams you’ve got. Good

for you.” I gave his arm a gentle, maternal pat. “Whatever you do, you’re going to be a superstar at it. I hope you know that.”

Who was I to give advice about dreams anyway? As has oft been said, kill my dreams once, shame on you. Kill my dreams twice,

move back in with my dad, work a minimum-wage job, and don’t waste any more time on dreams.

“Thanks, Addie.” He smiled at me as the phone rang. He grabbed the receiver. “Valet Forge Car Service. Where can we take you?”

I kept trying to convince Neil we needed to answer the phones with something snappier. Something more befitting our Revolutionary

War namesake. Thus far, however, neither of us had been able to come up with anything that didn’t use the words hypothermia or dysentery .

“Got it. Thanks,” Neil was saying on the phone. “I’ll head out now.” He grabbed the keys to the classic 1974 orange-and-white

Ford Bronco from the hook behind him.

“What’s up?”

“Roland, calling from the airport. Steve radioed ahead for a passenger arriving at about five forty-five.”

I glanced at my watch. Twenty minutes. I stepped down from the stool before placing my open palm in front of Neil so he could

hand me the keys. “Let me get it. QuickBooks is waiting for you to show her a good time.”